Her good friend Stella Schnabel shared a picture of her and Anita on Instagram and wrote: “I have never met a woman quite like you Anita. I don’t think there is anybody in this universe like you. No one has ever understood me so well. You showed about life and myself and how to grow and become and exist with it all.

“I was a little girl thinking I was big but I became a woman through knowing you. The secret lyrical you. My best friend. The greatest woman I have ever known. Thank you for the most important lessons – because they are ever changing and definitive. Like you. We are all singing for you, how you liked it.

However, in an interview with The Guardian in 2008, Anita didn’t regard that period in her life as a waste.

She explained: “I don’t think they were lost years. I went about doing what I did, travelling anyway, even if sometimes they had to carry me. Self-medication they call it now. I went into this – what do they call it before you become a butterfly? – cocoon for a long time. And in a way it’s kept me probably more childlike; that’s what drugs do to people, they stop emotional growth, so when you come out of it you’re kind of 17.”

Keith Richards was so Rock N Roll he once threw a TV off the balcony of his hotel room

It was her love of music which first attracted her to Brian and then the Stones all those decades ago.

She said: "I've always loved the blues and Brian especially was a real blues man. It was more than just pop. I thought they were great, you know. In those days. Now I'm not so sure! Somebody like Keith, he's got a future because he can sit up like a blues man until he's 90, he can just strum his guitar and sing his songs and people will always listen; but all this pop stuff, I'm not really interested."